Work like this is supposed to be worth millions to the local economy though. GRRM’s series pilot alone is supposed to be worth ~$10M. I’d love to see a break down of exactly where this sort of money goes. Paying local extras, catering, set building (joiners, electricians, etc.). Maybe some local effects and titling? Probably not. Lighting hire? Probably not. Hotel space? Definitely. But who are these joiners, electricians, and caterers? Are they small companies that need work, or the huge companies that already have million-pound contracts from government work and all?

Don’t get me wrong; it’s all good I’m sure, one way or another, and perhaps the best part is that it gives local kids a sense of opportunity — something that’s long been lacking here. But still… I’d love to hear more detail about what good it’s doing, on the ground.

Working through this in python is a very useful exercise; it’s teaching me lots about the most efficient ways of doing things in that language, and with the standard library tools, some of which I rarely find use for otherwise.

Anyway, together with some other things mentioned in the preface, Derivations seems like a very promising book. Except for one thing:

One particular respect in which the book departs requires some defense here, I think: the book employs hexadecimal numerals.

So it’s going to explain complex math, but it’s going to do it… in hexadecimal.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry. But I’ll see how it goes. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea that, “If one wishes to reach hexadecimal ground, one must leap.” It’s just that I don’t really see the point of becoming THAT fluent in hex, when understanding the basic concept of bases, and knowing how to convert from dec<>hex<>oct<>bin, that 2⁵ is 32, and that 2³² is roughly ~4 billion is almost certainly enough. Is this book really suggesting I learn to do all my math in hex? And if so, is there any real benefit? It does seem to suggest that math is more beautiful in hex, but I’ve never heard of anything special about base-16, in relation to laws of physics, for instance.

Well, find out next time, same bat-time, same bat-channel, I guess

Root rot. Fairly advanced root rot. Not good. I don’t think I overwatered it, but it almost certainly got overwatered while outside, in hindsight. Anyway, the question now isn’t what happened, but how can I help it to recover, if it can recover. Methinks it’s dead.

I haven’t given up though; I washed all the roots, and cut out as much root rot as I could bear too… the base of the trunk itself might have a tiny bit at the bottom around the outside edge, but I didn’t touch that. The only way to fix that would have been to saw through the trunk and then plant that in soil again, which seemed like more harm than good. And it might be just a bit wet/clayish from the previous soil. So yeah, I might have wimped out there, but I don’t know.

I put it in new soil, with a high percentage of grit, as instructed. Mostly grit means good drainage and less organic matter, which both mean less chance of survival for the “rot”, which is actually a combination of conditions that mutually encourage each other while attacking the tree: like waterlogging, and fungal infection. I dosed it with fungicide in the first watering after repotting.

I missed a few things though… apparently, I should have disinfected the pot with jeyes fluid before putting the tree back into it, and “soil” with no organics (in other words, pure clay pebbles, like they use for hydroponics) would have been better than other soil. But, I did the best with what I knew and what I had; I really didn’t want to wait around any longer when I was finally convinced that it wasn’t going to recover on its own.

So. Now I wait and see. It has a chance, I guess. There’s still some life in it; I know that much. The upper branches do seem to have died back though. Hehheh… I may have to put this one down to experience

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

+

http://www.podcastingnews.com/forum/link_211.htm

+

Bittorrent site feeds

= Internet TV

For anyone who’s still a bit lost, the podcasting thing has been spreading to video for a while. But it’s always been just a little too awkward, until now. But Democracy Player changes all that. Just install the app, and start choosing programs you’d like to watch, and channels you’d like to subscribe to (free of course). It’ll download episodes for you from all over the net — of actual TV shows on bittorrent sites, or just from hundreds (so far) of independent producers on the web. It takes some time to download them but you just pick them, and forget about it, and it tells you when they’re done. After a while, unless you choose to save them, it’ll remove them again to save space. It’s a lot like a TIVO or other PVR (Sky+ anyone?), but free, and much bigger in terms of potential.

The only problem is that the player is still a bit flakey, and it’s not compatible with every feed out there, but it’s still very usable, and judging from their site, it looks like it’ll keep improving.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but it looks a lot like the top-down TV and movie industries are really going to go the same way as the music industry is beginning to go. So maybe someday we’ll finally reach that stage where the music and video industries are true meritocracies, with only popularity and quality determining which feeds are the most successful.

This is fascinating stuff. I’d recommend having a good play with this, even if you don’t think you’ll use it for real until it matures some

*sigh* if only Smallville wasn’t postponed ;(

But there’s a small debate going on now, about why Linux has to do this, when it’s supposed to be a feature of the laptop/drive itself. Theoretically, if this was done inside a chip in the drive of the laptop, it’d probably work much faster and more reliably.

So, part of the discussion (on LWN.net) about doing it in software took a Jab at how windows asks you silly questions:

Why is this level of software support needed?
This is needed by the windows driver, it has to displays a popup:
Falling laptop wizard

Exclusive “hard drive active protection system” technology
is detecting that your laptop is falling.

Do you want Windows stop the hard disks ?
[YES] [NO] [HELP]

(Posted Oct 21, 2005 11:44 UTC (Fri) by guest tushar@mwti.net) (Post reply)
So u expect to press yes when it falls from table? If u can press yes that why not to hold it properly.

(Posted Oct 28, 2005 6:10 UTC (Fri) by guest turpie) (Post reply)
If you’re confused as to how that popup dialog operates try reading this article for more information.

And another, even better part of the discussion:

IMHO subsystems like this (including other things like fan controllers and CPU temperature sensors should not depend on the host CPU at all. The host CPU is busy doing other things, thank you very much, and may not always be able to respond to a whiny little sensor nobody has ever heard of

Hehhehheh

The Debian Project has lost another member of its community. Jens
Schmalzig (jensen) died on July 30th in a tragic accident at his
workplace in Munich.

Jens was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, as
supporter of the PowerPC port, as a member of the kernel team, and was
instrumental in taking the PowerPC kernel package to version 2.6. He
also maintained the Mac-on-Linux emulator and its kernel modules,
helped with the installer and with local Munich activities. The
kernel team dedicates the 2.6.12-2 release to him.

The Debian Project honours his good work and strong dedication to
Debian and Free Software. The contribution of Jens will not be
forgotten, and other developers will continue his work.

Jens will be missed. He left behind a wife and three children, who
have our sympathy.

*sigh*. Didn’t know the guy… I’m sure I’ve had a conversation or two with him over bugs or something, but I can’t track them down now. I use and appreciate the fruits of his work every day though, and I’m sure I’ll notice the gap left behind

Hope his family are doing OK

I also hope his name goes on a memorial someday, as one of the people who made a stand against the loss of software freedom. I really do consider these guys heroes in a sense — not in the big sense of a lone crusader, but they’re all really trying, in their own small way, to make the world better for us all. Judging from what he was involved with, Jens was one of the brighter lights among them

Dormi, eble sonĝi, mi pensas. Dormi nun, fakte!

Sed… mi ankoraŭ ne scias kiam uzi “iĝ” kaj “ig” kaj, kelkfoje “ad”, ankaŭ. Iam, mi scius! Eble, la demandoj ke mi skribas al mi instruisto estos utila. Eble ne, sed mi vivas en espero

Translation (or at least, I hope this is roughly equivalent : learned the stuff I needed to know and so got back to lernu.net’s next course tonight. Still some stuff I don’t know that’s bugging me lots, but I’ll work it out eventually

Today (apparently) was the 150^th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s birthday. There was a really beautiful show on BBC in tribute to him, produced by Amnesty International and others. Basically, lots of actors and other famous figures, either commenting on the beauty of his work, reading his own words very sincerely but directly addressing them to him, or simply embracing the depth of feeling as they acted out something of his. Quite amazing. I’ve liked most of what I knew of Oscar Wilde for years now (mostly The Soul of Man)… but tonight, I discovered that Wilde wrote a lot of the words that I try to carry with me. Beyond that, some of the poetry I heard is just amazingly beautiful. One of these days, I’m going to take the time to find out much more about that guy

By contrast, I also watched a program about how India, which over millennia has produced some of the most interesting and influential spiritual systems in the world, is now becoming a place filled with religious intolerance. Groups who imagine themselves to be Hindus are passing out symbolic knives to be used as actual weapons against other religions, and people are preaching hatred on the streets to large audiences. Sad stuff. Especially given that Buddha taught the reasons for all such insanity over 2000 years ago in that very sub-continent, along with the ways out of it, and he specifically did so as a non-religious figure

In more ugliness, a documentary about Blair’s actions leading up to war etc. is on in the background. I’m fairly certain that nutcase is going to get re-elected soon

And there’s still more ugliness. But hopefully this kind isn’t quite so devastating to world peace etc. I’ve finally got Blender working again with my 3D drivers, so I spent a bit of yesterday and today modelling a face template (image no longer available). It’s not much to look at, but it’s a good achievement for me, since it involved lots of new modeling techniques I’d never done before. The tutorial I was following was pretty confusing and I had to do a few stages very differently, so the way it all worked out well says a lot about my progress. It’s only intended as a template that can be applied to specific photographs and shaped to make actual faces later, and I need to finish the skin, but I’m happy with it so far. Happy with the lips too, since I just guessed those completely.

Not sure how to connect the lips to the face right now, but I’ll figure that out next time

XHTML page generation is supported too, although that’s just started and not useful yet. It has a lot of potential though, especially with the layer based engine and Inkscape’s ability to add arbitrary details to the rectangles. It already takes attribs from the rectangle to know what filenames to save slices as, but in future, people will be able to add attribs to their rectangles that specify output format (JPG, PNG, etc.) and compression, and probably some other things like solid colour areas with no image. If I can make it smart enough to analyse the rectangle’s positions and generate good XHTML for them, it could be a very powerful tool

Anyway, it’s useful enough already, so I’m gonna release it soonish, and hope some other folks take enough interest to start adding features too

Saw Constantine tonight. It’s pretty cool: different enough to be interesting. But not very interesting. Speaking of movies, a headline is scrolling across my screen to the effect that Joss Whedon is going to do a Wonder Woman movie. Eeek. To paraphrase Alice Cooper, he used to be cool, but that’s just insane Still waiting to see the Firefly movie though

Anyways. Sleep.